Student Loan - Loans and Debt Consolidation

SOMETHING OLD SOMETHING NEW SOMETHING BORROWED OOPS NEW YORK TIMES

How Debt Can Destroy a Budding Relationship

Kerrie Tidwell, a medical student, is struggling to figure out the right way to manage her debt with her long-term boyfriend, Stefan Kogler.

By RON LIEBER

Published: September 3, 2010

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman s fianc found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.

Tami Chappell for The New York Times

Ms. Tidwell will probably rack up $250,000 in debt by the time she is done with school.

These were the questions that weighed on Kerrie Tidwell. A third-year student at the Medical College of Georgia and an aspiring emergency room doctor, she doesn t worry so much about her ability to pay back her loans.

Ms. Tidwell, 26, is involved in a serious relationship with Stefan Kogler, an architect who is a native of Austria and living in Vienna. To Europeans, who often pay little or nothing toward their university studies, the idea of going deeply into debt to get educated is, well, foreign.

Ms. Tidwell feels no guilt about the $250,000 in debt she will probably run up, including some from a master s degree program she completed in London, where she and Mr. Kogler met. I didn t acquire it because I go out and shop a lot, she said. It s because I m doing something that I ll love for the rest of my life.

Still, if she and Mr. Kogler ...[more]